Phil Reisman: Who was there for us when JFK was killed? A teacher

Nov. 16, 2013

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Westchester County was not John F. Kennedy country in 1960. It was Republican turf.

The presidential candidate stopped here once, a few weeks before the election.

Standing in the rain, JFK spoke to a crowd of 8,000 people who gathered outside the train station at Larkin Plaza in Yonkers, but they could hardly hear him because the foul weather short-circuited the sound system. So he shouted and said, “Rain or shine, good times or bad, the country is going to move in the ’60s!” — at least that’s how a reporter heard it.

Kennedy got 44 percent of the Westchester vote, which, all things considered, was a pretty good showing. Three years later, a newspaper feature predicted “tongue in cheek” that the 1964 campaign would be an “all Westchester election” between Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of Pocantico Hills and Kennedy, whose family lived in Bronxville during the Great Depression.

Sylvia Dickinson was not particularly interested in politics in 1963. The high ambitions of great and near-great men did not concern her.

“I had other things on my mind,” she said, looking back 50 years.

She was 29 years old, and in her second year of teaching the fourth grade at Murray Avenue Elementary School.

To most 9-year-olds, Kennedy was a blur of images in Life magazine, which came Fridays in the afternoon mail. He had a beautiful wife and, like our fathers, was the father of young children. And like our fathers, he was born in the 20th century and had fought in the war. It was their generation’s turn to lead, they said.

The torch had been passed.

When Kennedy was shot, we were in the safe, sheltered world of Miss Dickinson’s fourth-grade class, learning long division and decimals.

Matt Wald, a classmate, recalled that someone summoned Miss Dickinson into the hallway. A few minutes later, she returned and looked “shaken,” he said.

“Then she turned on the TV, a black-and-white thing with rabbit ears on a stand in the corner of the class. My recollection is we watched until they sent us home at 3 p.m.”

Debra Wassman remembered it “very clearly.” It was another teacher who broke the news to Miss Dickinson, she said.

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Another classmate, Adam Nagourney, said that an announcement came over the PA system, saying that the president had died “and we needed to go home.”

“I think the teacher was crying,” he said.

If she wasn’t crying, Miss Dickinson was certainly stunned and anxious.

“After I heard what happened I worried,” she recalled. “What am I going to say to the children? How can I possibly answer questions that I don’t have the answers to? But we all sat there and we watched television and everybody was quiet.”

She remembered one of the students, a boy named Curtis Baer.

“I looked up and there was Curtis in front of me and he had put his head down on the desk,” she said. “He wouldn’t look up at anybody. This really touched me, that it affected him so much. I wonder if he remembers.”

The local afternoon paper, The Mamaroneck Daily Times, managed a late-breaking headline, “Kennedy Shot to Death.” The paper reported that “only shuffling and sobs” could be heard in the halls of Mamaroneck High School.

“Children were so affected that groups went to churches for prayer, immediately after announcement of the death,” one story said. Reaction quotes were dutifully solicited from community leaders — the school superintendents, mayors and clergy.

An editorial decried “a dastardly tragedy.”

Going through the pages of the newspaper was like traveling to a distant world. Stores like E.J. Korvettes and B. Altman and banks like Larchmont Federal Savings & Loan and all of the movie theaters that lined Main Street in New Rochelle are long extinct. Even the comic strips seem so outdated now, as well as unfunny.

Judging from the plethora of full-page liquor advertisements, adults must’ve drunk heavily in those days. Noticed, too, were the fashion ads for dresses and pillbox hats that looked awfully similar to the outfit Jackie Kennedy wore that day in Dallas.

I have little memory of Nov. 22, 1963.

I remember being dismissed from class and walking home on a cold November day, but I don’t really know if that’s the way it was. The sky could’ve been blue.

Sylvia Dickinson, who eventually married (she’s Sylvia O’Connor now), retired from Murray in 1989. Today, she lives with her husband in State College, Pa., where she spoke to me on the phone last week.

A half-century ago, she was the first adult who spoke to us after the president was killed — and we didn’t even know her first name or where she lived. All we knew was that she was our teacher, bound to us in tragedy.

“This is really odd,” she said. “After being with all you children, I remembered I had a hairdresser’s appointment that day.

“I got in my car and suddenly I was quiet, all by myself. And then this came down on me — the reality of what had happened.

“I kept thinking, ‘How could this happen in this country? How could this happen?’ ”